Monitoring the status of a research community through a Knowledge Map

The NoE (Network of Excellence) INTEROP is an instrument for strengthening the excellence of European research in interoperability of enterprise applications, by bringing together the complementary competences required to develop interoperability in a more global and innovative way. One of the main objectives of INTEROP was to build a so-called “Knowledge Map” (KMap) of partner competences, a competency management system used to perform a periodic diagnostic of the extent of the research collaboration and coordination among the NoE members. The aim was to monitor the status of research in the field of interoperability through a web-based platform that allows the user to retrieve information according to his/her actual need in a specific situation. In the KMap, the information is semantically indexed and retrieved through a domain ontology, which was semi-automatically created using a novel methodology, based on interleaved machine learning and collaborative validation phases. This paper describes the architecture of the KMap and provides a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the advantages of a semantically indexed knowledge base as a means to improve information accessibility and network analysis.